The same-sex marriage upgrades expanded Labor’s ability to record people’s intentions about the controversial survey.

These were stored in part of its database called the “Propensity Table”.

‘Not a data breach’

Magenta Linas spokesperson Andrew Navakas said the release of this information was not a data breach, as part of a three-line statement provided to the ABC.

“This is an administrative task list and does not constitute a data breach,” he said.

David Vaile, executive director of the UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre, the release was caused by a failure to take even simple precautions.

“It’s not a personal information data breach — although there were quite a lot of names of politicians and the people in the companies involved — but it is a really fundamental breach of security,” he said.

“It’s not as if hackers have broken through your defences, it’s as if you didn’t bother to put the defences up in the first place.”

ALP’s spokesperson said the party “takes our responsibilities under the Commonwealth Electoral Act very seriously”.

Campaign secrets

It’s not clear when the task list was first published, but the listings note they were “updated” in March this year.

The links were no longer active but the Google cache of results had kept copies of the tasks. These were created in August.

Apart from the work on the same-sex marriage survey, the information included jobs completed for Labor MPs including Mark Butler, Peter Khalil, Murray Watt and Wayne Swan.